Making Sankey Charts with Tableau and Alteryx – Download the Template to Make Your Own

Here’s my first step to making this a scalable viz for anyone interested in building this without all the legwork.

There’s a lot of demand to scale such a viz so I thought I would put my 2 cents in. It only works for visualizations with 5 stages and where each unique ID moves from dimension to dimension (rather than the flow of measures) – but still a start!

Why 5 Stages?

I’ve chosen to release the first iteration with 5 stages because of its potential application for sales pipelines: lead, prospect, qualified prospect, committed and transacted. Apply this to your Salesforce data to visualize common customer paths and areas of improvement.

With this method, I built this beautiful Sankey below outlining a friends’ job search.

How do you get your hands on such treasures? You’ll need Alteryx Designer and Tableau Desktop (both which offer trial versions in case you are new to either software.)

Run the Alteryx workflow with your dataset, selecting which fields are in Stage 1 through 5. Then set the where you’ll want your .tde to save to on your machine. Note that this method only works for 5 Stage Sankey charts because the table calculations will break otherwise. Also your stages need to be field values before running the Alteryx workflow.

Once downloaded, switch the .tde connection with the new .tde you’ve produced from the workflow.

Here’s where you’ll need to click to switch the .tde files.

Once the switch is made, your viz should magically appear! Just change the alias’s to match your desired results and you’ve got a Sankey chart in 10 minutes!

Let me know what you think of the workflow/workbook or anything else in the post. More than happy to clarify if there are questions. I’m hoping this will be useful to at least someone on the interwebs!

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Emily Chen

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Sometimes when we’re running a script, we want to be able to break down and review portions of our code. In Alteryx, we can easily do that with the cached results function in every tool or we can use the Browse tool. In Python, we can use this little trick with the “raw_input()” function.